The black rhino and the mountain gorilla swinging on the edge of extinction. . .

You don’t have to be Doctor Dolittle to imagine animals are telling you something.

Whether in a whisper, a cry or flat out begging for a snack.

The canary in the mine. The dog racingminutes before an earthquake strikes.

They have their own voices but not likely ones your friends post on Facebook.

We put our words in their mouths.Can we hear ones they try to put in our ears?

Unlike us, animals live on a frequency of whole being and love even if they are killing each other. They’ve got the number one instinct all God’s creatures share – survival.

So, what’s happening? Sure, throughout history species have come and gone.Mother Nature can’t stop creating and she abhors a vacuum.But more species are hitting the Endangered List not from natural transition but our part in everything from global warming to poisons to poaching.What are the animals trying to tell us?I’m thinkingmore than “moo” says the cow and “oink” says the pig.

Maybe it’s something like we love you. We inhabit this world with you. But we can’t take the abuse anymore.Maybe it’s that their modern diseases, like so many of our own, come from unprecedented stress.Are they telling us stress has made them so sick they’d rather leave the planet?Is the griefin the pit of our hearts a dread knowing we’re going to miss them if they’re gone?

But what if our animals are also saying, “look, People – you’ve got a power here that we don’t.You’ve got imagination.What if you use your boundless imaginations anew and listen to the inconvenient truths you’ve been trying to semi hear for decades?

There’s the Endangered Species List and certain species once on it that through human attention are now safely off.And we can still be one of them.

Are the animals our prophets of doom or poets?In this complex world, what’s the universal message they are trying to tell us?Maybe it’s in the shortest poem in the English language made up on the spot by the great Mohammed Ali in l975: